by Joseph Hone
Bridget wasn’t reading. There had simply been a silence between them, the empty stillness after a row—as though she and Colonel Hamdy had just had a flaming row: that was it, Edwards was sure of it.
The telephone, taken out on a long extension from the drawing room, was on a table between them. The three of them glanced at it, like a gun, before it started a long, stumbling, jittery ring.
“Aiowa,” the Colonel said. “Aiowa,” between pauses, impatiently, as though confirming a grocery order with a tiresome merchant.
“Well, the man isn’t dead.” The Colonel put the phone down. “Just burnt. The trouble is they think you’re going to blow the Yunis business to the press, that you really are a journalist. That’s the problem. We’ll have to get you out of here.”
Edwards put the racket on the parapet and took a cigarette from a pack on the table. Bridget leant forward, handing him a lighter, taking one herself. He realized he was shaking now, the cigarette bouncing around in his hand. Not from the cold, the terrace was warm from years of continual sunlight. Bridget had never looked like speaking. There was surprise, certainly; the incredulous lines on someone’s face before one laughs.
“Before I came,” Edwards said, looking at her intently, as if searching for a vital response, “what were you fighting about?”
“We weren’t fighting. Hamdy just told me you were here. That you’d been arrested at the airport, being held by security. We were thinking.” She looked at the Colonel. “Now that you’re here you might as well know,” he said. “Why not?” And Bridget went on quickly, as if making up for something, making up for years of necessary lies: “I’m sorry you didn’t know about Hamdy before. I couldn’t tell you.”
“What?”
“That he’s with us. That he’s always been.”
“With Holborn?”
“Yes.” Bridget got up and went to organize a drinks tray in the room behind.
“How the hell is it you’re the only one to know about it then?” Edwards shouted after her. “That’s a likely story.” He was trying to be angry. “How come I’ve never heard of it? With twenty years in the same section.” He was about to add “With twenty years working for the same man” but stopped himself in time.
“Don’t be stupid.” The Colonel came over towards him. “Of course you never heard about it, could never hear of it. Do you think my position with Egyptian intelligence here would have been secure if I’d ever been an official part of the Holborn circle in Cairo? No one knew. Except central office.”
“And Bridget”
“Yes.”
“But she was just sustenance. Lemons at half time. To keep you going. I know. But what about me?” He lowered his voice. “I’ve been working for you for twenty years, for your Egyptian office. Why did you never tell them that in London?”
“Because it didn’t matter. Nothing I got from you ever went beyond me. I needed you for my own cover with the Egyptians. Don’t you see? I had to be able to show them that I had control of at least one man in Holborn, that I’d turned him. It was a crucial point. That way they were never likely to suspect that I worked for Holborn too. But I shouldn’t talk about it. She doesn’t know.”
Bridget came back with a tray and some whisky. Edwards sighed. It made sense. like so many things did which you’d least suspected: it was the longest shot in the world, that the Colonel worked for London. But that was what the whole business was about; seeing who could be the cleverest.
And he realized how it explained Bridget’s ease, even her light-headedness, over his arrival: it wasn’t the danger of the situation which had occurred to her, it was the fact that the three of them were now being “true” to each other at last, in really knowing about each other. And just as she’d welcomed Marlow into the “British camp” ten years before—with a sudden overwhelming joy because the pretence of their threefold relationship was over, so now she was inviting Edwards to join the celebration of a similar “truth” which she had obviously enjoyed for a long time with the Colonel. This time Edwards was the guest—at a reception of a marriage that must have occurred years before.
She handed Edwards his whisky almost formally, smiling hugely, as though he was the first man in a receiving line at a lucky late wedding, the Colonel behind her, flapping about the place like an embarrassed groom.
For Bridget the grubby, deceitful days were over and she was celebrating.
Celebrating what? That the Colonel had been a loyal British agent all along and that he’d just been used to give him cover, while really believing Hamdy was working for the Egyptians. That was worth a drink. And perhaps if one day the three of them really got to know each other, Edwards thought, he’d tell them he actually worked for Moscow.
The telephone rang again. Bridget picked it up.
“‘A message from Hassenein,’” she repeated the words at the other end. “‘Would I tell my friend he can pick up his car now. The brakes have been fixed.’ Right, I’ll do that.” She put the receiver back. “Someone from the Semiramis. Who’s ‘my friend’? Is that your car, Hamdy—is that you?”
So Henry had done for him after all, long before, on the plane, with Yunis. The Colonel wondered why he didn’t go for him there and then, kill him, wipe him out—wondered why he just stood there patting his pockets absentmindedly. Because of his togs, he thought—the ridiculously billowy shorts and blazer, the Chaplin plimsolls, the rakish clotted hair and mended spectacles: one didn’t go for a man so obviously down. There wasn’t the air of a traitor about Henry, it was useless. He looked, he had been behaving, like the second lead in a marital farce, the cuckolded husband, bursting through the French windows, intent on hopeless revenge; so it was that the Colonel couldn’t contemplate a similar role. He thought of the message from the Semiramis instead.
The suffix “now” meant just what it said. “The brakes have been fixed” stood for “get clear at all costs” and “Hassenein” was the code name for a man he’d never met: one of the other men—he’d no idea how many there were—who, like him, worked for Tel Aviv in Egyptian intelligence. He had never been given any method of contacting these people; they were pilot fish, infiltrated into various sections of the Cairo apparat over the years—as cypher clerks, secretaries, telephonists, messengers—almost solely for the purpose of warning him of impending disaster. They contacted the telephonist at the Semiramis who had his home number, and Bridget’s, and she had passed the message on.
The form of the message had been agreed many years before, the Colonel remembered, just after the war when the British Army had still been in the Kasr el Nil barracks and he’d managed to buy a pre-war Morris 8 with perfect brakes from a major of a returning regiment The major, a Jew, had been his initial contact with the Israeli underground. Subsequently he had left the army and gone to Palestine. The Colonel had worked for him ever since. They’d drunk themselves silly together in Shepheard’s all afternoon before he got the train to Port Said to join his men and the ship home. Gin and limes. Gin and everything. “Let’s hope your brakes never fail,” the major had said, and he’d stumbled into a gharry, the harness bells tinkling away into the flare-lit alleys beyond Opera Square.
Well, the brakes had gone now, and with them twenty years, many more than a thousand and one nights. He’d betrayed a country and he’d come to love it—to love it greatly in exact proportion to his treachery. He was bored by the grip this cliché had had on him, appalled now that it had held him in Egypt so blindly, for so long. He ought to have seen from the beginning that he would one day have to accept an equally banal ending: that he wouldn’t get away with it for ever. If he’d come to hate Egypt he would almost certainly have survived, he thought. Hate protected you from clichés.
“It’s a ‘get clear’ message, Hamdy, isn’t it?” Edwards said. “No one’s really phoning you about your brakes. And you can’t have much time if they’re prepared to use an open line to you.”
Bridget didn’t wait for him to answer.
&nbs
p; “What is it, Hamdy? What’s happened?”
The Colonel had only moments to make up his mind. He could agree that it was a code message, but simply from his own section in Cairo—leave them, and try and get clear. Or he could take them with him. The first choice was the obvious one. Yet he prevaricated with himself for a second, found himself arguing the toss against his will. And the moment he began that he knew he was finished. He might get clear of Egypt with luck, as an ordinary man; he would never again survive as a professional. He didn’t mind. He argued; he delayed; he thought of Bridget. It was impossible to get clear of Egypt without going through a number of elaborate pre-arrangements, he reminded himself—which needed time to organize and a place to do that from. He had the place, the top floor apartment in Gezira. It was where he took Bridget when they were in town together, when they “had a moment” …
It was really only a matter of whether he brought Edwards with him too, he thought, since he’d now established that he wasn’t going to leave Bridget behind. And then he realized that he had no alternative but to take Henry—if he wanted Bridget. From her point of view, after all, they were now three British agents on the run: like an old British film.
“Henry’s right, isn’t he?” Bridget said. “Intelligence here has found out you’re with London. Someone from the Consulate—or that man at the airport—they’ve warned you?”
The Colonel nodded. “Come on. Don’t pack. But get Henry one of your father’s coats or something. And a pair of trousers. It’s not the moment for squash.”
The house was a dry oven smelling of orange blossom and cedar when they left. The clock which had been made in Bath chimed the first quarter after eleven slowly, four bell-like notes in a scale, the bull of Taurus moving round a semi-circle at the bottom, and a large Humpty-Dumpty moon bouncing over the blue-starred horizon above. Bridget took a couple of copies of Country Life with her as she went.
Was that what had kept her going in Cairo all these years, Edwards wondered: the idea of returning eventually to England once with him, once with Marlow, and now with the Colonel? When the story finally broke, and all their cover gone, she might, if they were very lucky, achieve a lifetime’s ambition; come into her due reward: something small and half-timbered in Sussex, a paddock and a fast midday train to the London shops, with Hamdy sipping gassy bitter in the Wheatsheaf at weekends. “Tea planting, don’t you know. Back from a little trouble in Ceylon.”
Was that the dull reason for her attachment to the Colonel? In his twenty years as a double in Egypt he must have outranked everyone except Williams in the Holborn section. Perhaps, she may even have reckoned, Hamdy might be in line for a manor in the Cotswolds—if they ever made it home.
Intrigue, Edwards thought, what a lot of bloody intrigue. He took the bottle of whisky with him. He would have to look to his own intrigues from now on. Moscow perhaps. He too needed time to make preparations; the only sort of house he wanted at the moment was a safe one.
They turned left at the T junction from Maadi on to the Helwan road, swung the old Chrysler round facing Cairo three hundred yards away under some trees by the river, and waited. There was only one road back to the city on the narrow stretch of land between the Mokattam Hills and the Nile, the road they’d have to use if they were coming after the Colonel.
Fifteen minutes later they came, not fast and not all together: a Mercedes and then two jeeps, recent Russian models, without markings. They turned off into the clumpy velvet evergreens of the estate, one jeep stopping to block the road out, and the other two vehicles turning round the circle by the Club and going on towards Bridget’s house.
Edwards and the Colonel crouched down in the back seat and Bridget, waiting another minute for some other cars to pass, drove quietly after them towards the city.
BOOK FOUR
CAIRO, MAY 1967
1
I didn’t try to remember anything as the taxi jumped and swerved along the airport road into the city: either remember or compare. I told myself—all that was ten years ago, this was now. There were few cars on the road and fewer lights, just the swishing shadows of airline billboards and half-completed buildings on either side of the highway. I might have been driving along the airport road of any warm, desert country. I was a traveller being taken to his hotel with a decent enough suitcase, a change of linen tropicals, a carton of Philip Morris, a bottle of Haig, and an allowance of £11 a day made up in £200-worth of American Express travellers’ cheques, to include expenses …
I had simply a business connection with the city: Edwards was supposed to be somewhere in it. And perhaps, in the unlikely event of my finding him, we might have a good meal together at the Estoril, a lager at the Regent, an afternoon at Gezira, and then come back to London and no more would be said about it. And if I didn’t find him I’d do these same things anyway, make a few discreet inquiries and get back home.
I was as tired of intrigue, suspicion and difficulty as I’d ever been in my life—and I’d tell Henry so if I came across him: that was the purpose of this trip, to find him and tell him he’d been right. There was nothing else, for I’d exhausted my past in this city as well—on the flight over with too much burgundy and too little sleep.
All I needed was to finish off this business as quickly as possible, with some pleasure perhaps, and get back. Then, with or without Henry, I would decide whether Williams and the Arab press still claimed me—or whether there was any real alternative in the Olive Grove Syndrome, the song-of-the-man-at-forty, the village in Galway.
I turned the window right down. There was just a smell of burnt newspapers and urine riding strongly into the car on the night air. Had there ever been the drift of sesame and spices, cloves and brick dust, through open windows here?—or the one thing in the empty afternoons we had done so well?
*
They gave me a room on the top floor of the Semiramis looking out over the river. Nothing had changed in the hotel, but there was no one I recognized. It was past midnight; the huge Edwardian shell of the building seemed not so much asleep as deserted. There was a new electric map of the city by the reception desk with coloured lights behind the various tourist attractions, and buttons that you pressed underneath to identify them. One of them had stuck and a light was flashing on and off half-way up Soliman Pasha Street. I looked at the label on the button: “Ministry of Tourism and National Guidance, 12 Talaat Harb.” The old name had gone but not, I noticed, the Perroquet Night Club in the National Hotel further up the same street. I pushed the button for it, so that a green parrot started to flash on the map and not the Ministry of National Guidance.
Cherry, Herbert Cherry of Greystones, Co. Dublin, had once attempted to play the trumpet in the orchestra there and they’d taken a month’s wages off him before they’d thrown us out. I would look for Cherry in the morning. The ubiquitous, fleshy, nervous Cherry. Cherry, our man in Cairo.
The English language magazine that Cherry worked for was edited and printed from the offices of the Egyptian Gazette off 26 July Street on the road up to the main station. They’d had an old copy on the hotel bookstall and I’d looked at it over breakfast. It was called Arab Focus and was done in a print and on a paper which quite belied its title. I tried to detect some of Cherry’s idiosyncratic Dublin-English in the mass of translated articles from Al Ahram and the Cairo weeklies, but I could find nothing of him at all in the arid prose about the High Dam, the stories about the last—and the next—Arab summit. I suppose the magazine wasn’t the best market for stories about greyhounds in the back of taxis on the way to Mullingar.
“Twenty-four Sharia Zakaria Ahmed,” I’d said to the cab driver outside the hotel and he’d then repeated the address to a policeman at a kindergarten table by the head of the rank.
“What’s that for?”
“Tourist police. We have to tell them where we’re going. With foreigners. Though you don’t speak Arabic like a foreigner.”
“I used to live here.”
The driver grunted and barged the car through a crowd waiting to cross the main El Trahir Square, before swinging round, bumping within a foot of a tram, and then going up Kasr el Nil to the centre of town.
Already, at ten o’clock, the Midan was a cauldron, well on the boil: scribes and photographers under black umbrellas, gesticulating with envelopes and from behind velvet drapes, were manhandling petitioners in front of the huge Education and Home Affairs Ministry on one side of the square; hefty galibeahed and skull-capped farmers tore round the central island, Ben Hur fashion, in huge-wheeled ass carts like gun carriages on their way back into the country from market; children in oversized, stained pyjamas were selling ballpoints and grubby trinkets at every corner; soldiers with a day’s leave gazed blankly at the mysterious improbability of the flower clock next to the oily waste of the central bus stop; while the disintegrating maroon buses themselves, with dozens of people hanging on with toes and ringers to the outside, heeled over gracefully on the roundabout like fishes, the tips of the mudguards scraping up the soft tar.
Nothing had changed on the Midan in ten years: this arid, scrubby, filthy, dangerous hodge-podge of baking concrete—the “Hub of the City” which had repulsed so easily so many attempts to “integrate” it, or “improve” it since the British had left and the old Kasr el Nil barracks on the same site had been destroyed. It remained a no man’s land between the bridges over the river on one side and the town proper to the east.
I had lived here. In the blazing light with the sweat bubbling already under my arms, there was no chance of denying it now.
On Kasr el Nil, moving the old European centre towards Soliman Pasha roundabout (he had been replaced by the hero Talaat Harb, bird-limed in his cocky tarbrush), things were more shabby and broken down than ever. The once pompous Haussmann-plan streets, the ornate French-Levantine-style apartments with their excessive curly stucco, decorative rue de Rivoli arches, balconies and roof balustrades, were all rubbing away, splitting, in the crackling hot-cupboard air. The pavements were an obstacle course of blistering, volcanic mounds; the traffic lights broken coloured spectacles winking a pale white light; a plate-glass window had gone in Au Salon Vert and sand blew in through every doorway.